So, How’d He Do?

So, How Did Mayor Koch Do?

Representative Edward I. Koch on Sept. 8, 1977, the day of the Democratic primary for mayor.

Paul Hosefros / The New York Times

By JOSEPH BERGER

February 2, 2013

Ed Koch, the blunt-spoken and theatrical three-term mayor of New York City, who became a national emblem for the way New Yorkers talk and behave, often asked straphangers at subway stops to assess his record with a “How’m I doin’?”

With his death on Friday at 88, it seemed only fitting to ask that question once more — in retrospect.

There is no doubt that Mr. Koch restored the spirit of the city after years of urban decay that had crystallized in the city’s near bankruptcy, and that reached a nadir of sorts in 1977 with the Son of Sam killings, a blackout and riots. Mr. Koch, a Democrat, took office in January 1978 and, with his moxie, was able to quickly create a sense among New Yorkers that someone was fighting to turn the city around.

“The city needed hope, it needed a champion, it needed a voice,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy at New York University. “Ed Koch became that voice.”

Even the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, the pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, who tangled frequently with Mr. Koch over what he felt was the mayor’s insensitivity to African-Americans, said Mr. Koch was the right mayor for his time.

“If you’ve got to have a mayor for New York City, you need a guy like Ed Koch because he’s a rough-and-tumble kind of guy who speaks up and fights back,” he said.

The Koch-era legacy is substantial. Experts cite the investment of billions of dollars in rebuilding abandoned housing, which revived desolate areas of the South Bronx, Harlem and central Brooklyn; the restoration of the city’s fiscal integrity to the point where banks and government watchdogs were ready to let it manage its own finances; the rehabilitation of neglected parks; the genesis of Times Square’s transformation from a sleazy, dangerous crossroads to a family-friendly entertainment and office center; the trading in of federal money designated to build a new West Side Highway for money that would buy subway trains and buses; the pressure on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to virtually eliminate subway graffiti; and the enacting of a campaign finance law in 1988 under which candidates would limit their spending in exchange for receiving public matching funds.

On the ledger’s deficit side, experts say Mr. Koch needlessly antagonized African-American New Yorkers and allowed his reputation for let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may integrity to be tarnished by corruption scandals that started in the Parking Violations Bureau and raised questions about his alliances with political bosses. Together, those failures might have cost him a fourth term.

Fred Conrad/The New York Times

On Election Day, Nov. 3, 1981, Mayor Edward I. Koch was swarmed by reporters after voting in Greenwich Village. Mr. Koch, who died on Friday, has been credited with helping revive desolate areas in the South Bronx and elsewhere, restoring the city’s fiscal integrity and rehabilitating its neglected parks.

While opinions about the former mayor may vary, there is no doubt he left a notable mark in several areas.

HOUSING

To grasp the scope of Mr. Koch’s accomplishment, consider the visit that President Jimmy Carter made in 1977 to the South Bronx, where he stood with Mayor Abraham D. Beame in a rubble-strewed patch of Charlotte Street against a backdrop of ghostly, gutted buildings. That characteristic landscape changed dramatically starting in 1986 with a 10-year plan by Mr. Koch that led to the spending of more than $5 billion on building low- and moderate-income housing and on rehabilitating vacant buildings. The program eventually created more than 150,000 affordable apartments, according to Ted Houghton, executive director of the Supportive Housing Network of New York. Charlotte Street itself was turned into a row of suburban-style ranch houses that a few years ago were selling for $500,000 apiece. There are few lots in the Bronx that sit empty anymore.

“When you walk through today’s vibrant neighborhoods in Harlem, Bed-Stuy and the South Bronx, thank Ed Koch,” Mr. Houghton said in an e-mail. “If it wasn’t for his 10-year housing plan, we’d still be looking at acres and acres of abandoned buildings, like one continues to see in a lot of less fortunate, older Eastern cities.”

PARKS

In the years before Mr. Koch became mayor, many of the city’s signature parks had gone to seed — partly as a result of lack of money, but also because of a poorly administered and patronage-ridden bureaucracy. Central Park had become so dangerous it was ridiculed by late-night comedians.

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Holly Leicht, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks.

“In the Koch administration, the parks took on an elevated position that they hadn’t really had since the Robert Moses era,” said Holly Leicht, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks.

Parks commissioners like Gordon J. Davis and Henry J. Stern decentralized their department, delegating more authority to officials in the boroughs and appointing new parks administrators for Central Park and Prospect Park. Those administrators ultimately cobbled together public-private partnerships that have rejuvenated both parks. The Sheep Meadow, virtually a dust bowl when Koch took office, was turned into a green carpet, and the crumbling Bethesda Fountain into an aesthetic jewel. Adrian Benepe, who was a park ranger when Mr. Koch took office and eventually became the commissioner under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said a key moment was “having Simon and Garfunkel do a concert in Central Park in the early ‘80s, because it showed that Central Park was safe and fun at night.”

CRIME

Mr. Koch’s record on crime is more mixed. A few years into his tenure, crime began to recede, with murders declining to 1,386 in 1985 from 1,818 in 1980. Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who was a special adviser to Mr. Koch during his third term, said gains were made by techniques like concentrating police personnel on open-air drug markets where people were brazenly lining up to buy drugs. But the unseen rise of the crack cocaine epidemic in the mid-1980s led to a resurgence, as easy profits enticed many amateurs into drug dealing and neighborhood wars broke out. The administration’s response was “heroic,” Mr. Travis said, but hobbled by understaffing in the Police Department — about 26,000 officers at the time — as a result of the layoffs demanded by the 1970s fiscal crisis.

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“If you dialed 911, you couldn’t get a car to the scene in time,” Mr. Travis said. “An under-resourced department is not effective in fighting crime.”

By 1990, the year after Mr. Koch left office, murders hit a historic peak of 2,251. The situation did not begin to be reversed until the city hired 5,000 more officers late in the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins. Another form of crime, corruption, was spawned in Mr. Koch’s Parking Violations Bureau. There were no revelations suggesting that Mr. Koch personally profited, but the scandals left a stain because they indicated he was sometimes willing to make patronage appointments to sustain the backing of Democratic bosses like Meade H. Esposito, Donald R. Manes and Stanley M. Friedman.

HEALTH

Larry Kramer, the gay rights advocate who wrote the play “The Normal Heart"about the AIDS epidemic, recently accused Mr. Koch of ignoring the disease’s spread in a city with a large gay population because “he was terrified everyone would find out he was gay and he would lose his support from the real estate industry.” Mr. Kramer said Mr. Koch did not “tell people to change their behavior” and refused to meet with or finance gay activists. (Though he once responded to a questioner that he was heterosexual, Mr. Koch repeatedly said that his love life was nobody’s business but his own.)

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Larry Kramer, a gay rights advocate.

Stanley Brezenoff, the chief executive officer of Continuum Health Partners and a former deputy mayor under Mr. Koch, offered a different picture of Mr. Koch’s response to the AIDS epidemic. “It took a long time to recognize what was going on,” Mr. Brezenoff said, “and as we came to grips with it we became more focused on identifying concrete steps to take.” Mr. Koch, he said, agonized over a step like closing bathhouses used for promiscuous sex because it meant having to dispatch “investigators into bathhouses and spying on people in their most private moments.”

One health policy decision Mr. Koch came to regret was the closing — for reasons of poor performance — of Sydenham Hospital in Harlem. Mr. Koch said in recent years that he had not fully appreciated how important the hospital was to black doctors, who often had trouble receiving admitting privileges elsewhere.

Mr. Brezenoff, who was president of the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation from 1981 to 1982, credited Mr. Koch for spurring “the renaissance” of the agency, which had been in disarray, and for focusing its mission on primary care.

RACE RELATIONS

From the beginning, Mr. Koch frequently found himself at loggerheads with black ministers and politicians. The Sydenham closing stirred enormous resentment in Harlem. So did Mr. Koch’s abrasive style, which led him to call antipoverty organizers who were abusing the system “poverty pimps.” He might also have realized that more than a few of his white supporters appreciated such tough talk.

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

The Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.

“He was a politician and he knew what crowd he had to play to,” Mr. Butts, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, said.

But David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society of New York and a former Koch adviser, pointed out that Mr. Koch assembled the most diverse team of deputies and commissioners City Hall had ever seen, including Basil A. Paterson, Herman Badillo and Mr. Jones. Later, he appointed Benjamin Ward as the city’s first black police commissioner.

Mr. Koch also suffered because of racially charged episodes that sprang up on his watch: the 1984 shooting death of a 66-year-old black woman, Eleanor Bumpurs, by a white police officer during an eviction; the 1986 beating of three black men by a white gang in Howard Beach, Queens; the shooting death of Yusuf K. Hawkins by white youths weeks before the 1989 election.

Despite his condemnation of the mob beatings, it was hard to tamp down a sense among blacks that his public rhetoric — in the 1988 presidential campaign, for example, he said Jews would be “crazy” to vote for Jesse Jackson because of his “Hymietown” slur about New York and his support for a Palestinian homeland — may have helped foster an atmosphere in which some young whites felt emboldened to commit such assaults.

Still, Mr. Koch seemed to redeem himself in his post-mayoralty. The Rev. Al Sharpton Jr. became a friend, and Mr. Butts, who once said Mr. Koch was “worse than a racist, he was an opportunist,” said last week: “I never got the impression that he was a racist. He had his prejudices like everybody else and he allowed his temper and his I-know-what’s-best-for-everybody attitude to get in the way of sound judgment.”

TRANSIT

With its graffiti-coated subway cars and frequent breakdowns, the transit system Mr. Koch inherited had become one of the bleakest symbols of the city’s tailspin. Ridership had fallen to its lowest level since 1917, even before the modern subway system had been completed, according to Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the Straphangers Campaign.

While he had few direct powers to change matters, Mr. Koch harangued the Transportation Authority for its crackling, inaudible announcements; doubled, to $200 million, the city’s contribution for rebuilding; and urged that dogs patrol the subway yards, an idea that was barely tried. While originally a proponent of the West Side Highway, Mr. Koch eventually fought for trading in the federal highway funds for $1 billion to buy new subway cars. The last graffiti-marked car was taken out of service in his last year in office.

Video In Edward I. Koch’s early political base, Greenwich Village, and around the city, New Yorkers share feelings and recall encounters with the former mayor.

On Election Day, Nov. 3, 1981, Mayor Edward I. Koch was swarmed by reporters after voting in Greenwich Village. Mr. Koch, who died on Friday, has been credited with helping revive desolate areas in the South Bronx and elsewhere, restoring the city’s fiscal integrity and rehabilitating its neglected parks.

Fred Conrad / The New York Times

Holly Leicht, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks.

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Larry Kramer, a gay rights advocate.

Todd Heisler / The New York Times

The Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.